Ask Him Why
Authors: Catherine Ryan Hyde
Also by Catherine Ryan Hyde
Worthy
The Language of Hoofbeats
Pay It Forward: Young Readers’ Edition
Take Me with You
Paw It Forward
365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World
Where We Belong
Subway Dancer and Other Stories
Walk Me Home
Always Chloe and Other Stories
The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the Author of Pay It Forward
How to Be a Writer in the E-age: A Self-Help Guide
When You Were Older
Don’t Let Me Go
Jumpstart the World
Second Hand Heart
When I Found You
Diary of a Witness
The Day I Killed James
Chasing Windmills
The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance
Love in the Present Tense
Becoming Chloe
Walter’s Purple Heart
Electric God / The Hardest Part of Love
Pay It Forward
Earthquake Weather and Other Stories
Funerals for Horses
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Text copyright © 2015 by Catherine Ryan Hyde
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle
Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of
Amazon.com
, Inc., or its affiliates.
ISBN-13: 9781503950894 (hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1503950891 (hardcover)
ISBN-13: 9781503948907 (paperback)
ISBN-10: 1503948900 (paperback)
Cover design by Shasti O’Leary-Soudant / SOS CREATIVE LLC
First edition
Contents
Part One
Your Brother Knows
Remembering Spring 2003
Chapter One: Ruth
I was fifteen when our brother Joseph was shipped overseas to fight, and I was fifteen when he came home, uninjured, three and a half months later.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. The army doesn’t tend to have deployments that last only three and a half months.
That was the heart of our problem right there.
It was more than ten years ago, this part of things, but I still have a lot of clear mental snapshots. It wasn’t one of those days you’re likely to forget. Although sometimes I think we imprint only certain parts of it, like a series of snapshots, and then the rest falls away.
I wonder sometimes if the parts I kept are really the most important parts.
Anyway, when I got home from school there was a yellow cab parked in front of our house. I had no idea what was going on, but I knew it was something out of the ordinary, because that cab thing just didn’t happen in my world. That would have been almost like leaving ourselves open to new people or something.
The cab was sitting at the curb in front of our gate, the engine running, and I was walking down the street, getting closer to it in a way that seemed too gradual. Like time was stretching out. The whole thing seemed to be taking forever. It felt like one of those moving walkways at the airport, only in reverse—instead of making me feel like I could walk powerfully fast, this felt like I couldn’t get anywhere, no matter how hard I tried.
Nobody got in or out of the cab, which seemed weird.
When I got up to it, I saw there was nobody inside except the driver. He was about forty and had jet-black hair with a bald spot right in the middle. Right on top, which didn’t seem to be the way most bald spots are destined to behave. He was smoking a cigarette with the windows rolled up, so the smoke was just roiling around in there with no place to go. He wasn’t using his hands, either. His hands were both on the top of the steering wheel, like they hadn’t gotten the message that he wasn’t actively driving. I could see him use his lips and facial muscles to draw in and exhale the smoke.
I walked around to the street side and rapped on his window, and he jumped like I’d taken a shot at him.
He opened the driver’s-side window, and I could see by the motion of his shoulder that he still had those old-fashioned windows with cranks. Smoke rolled out, smelling nasty and stale.
See, this is what I meant about the snapshots. Maybe the cab driver wasn’t the real heart of the thing, but he got imprinted.
“What?” he asked, grumpy and challenging, like I had already put him out quite a bit, and now I’d best make this good.
“How can you do that?”
“Do what?”
“What if the next person in your cab is allergic to smoke? Or is a pregnant woman or something? Or just doesn’t want to breathe all that?”
A silence.
I watched him purse his lips and inhale, then push the smoke out through his nose. A light breeze carried it right into my face and I waved it away violently, and probably more dramatically than necessary.
Hey, I was fifteen. Drama was my contribution to the world.
His eyes narrowed. “Who
are
you?” he asked around the filter of the cigarette.
“I live here,” I said, thrusting my chin in the direction of my family’s enormous house. “I just wondered why you were sitting out here at our curb.”
“That’s a logical thing to wonder,” he said. “Especially compared to what you’ve been wondering so far, like why I do the things I do, or what my next fare’ll want. I’m waiting to get paid.”
“From . . . somebody . . . in there?” I indicated the house again with my chin.
“No, somebody at the airport. I just thought the view was nicer here. Yes, from somebody in your house. Anything else you’re wondering?”
“I’ll see if I can get something going with that,” I said.
“Fine.”
“I’ll be as fast as I can.”
“Take your time,” he said. Then, when the look on my face seemed to communicate that he was being uncharacteristically kind, he added, “Meter’s running.”
I walked up to my front door carefully, if such a thing were possible.
When I stepped into the living room, Joseph was sitting on the couch. He was in his uniform, and I was struck by how handsome he looked in it, how put-together. And being put-together was never his claim to fame before the army got their hands on him.
Mom was sitting on one side of him, Dad on the other, all of which was even more wrong than a yellow cab at the curb. Because my mom should have had her book group on Friday afternoon, and my dad was at work—pretty much every day—from the first light of morning until he knew the coast must have been cleared by the last of us going to bed. Even my mom was somebody he tried to avoid bumping into any more often than necessary.
The minute they looked up and saw me, they stopped talking.
Now, there are silences, and there are
silences
, especially in the house where we grew up. If we’d ever talked about the silences out loud, I’m sure we’d have had a hundred different words to identify them like the Eskimos do with snow. But then, if we’d talked about the silences there wouldn’t have been so many of them. I think I took myself around in a circle just then, which I blame on the silences. They don’t take you anywhere but back to where you started.
This silence was electrical. It had a dark crackle to it, but that kind of electricity can be upbeat and exciting at times. This wasn’t. This was heavy and sickening, like when the teacher’s wall phone rings in class and it’s me they’re looking for—me getting called down to the office.
When the weight of it got to be too much, I said something blunt and obvious: “Joseph. You’re home.”
Then I just waited.
Of course, Joseph knew he was home. I’m sure he didn’t need me to point it out to him. But that was another one of our silence types: the one where you state something brutally evident because you don’t understand it, and then stand there and say nothing and hope someone will explain voluntarily, because you can’t bring yourself to ask.
Fifteen and a half years on the planet, in that household, and I still hadn’t found a word for that one.
Joseph seemed to have nothing to say. Joseph rarely said much, but I remember feeling that a word or two would have been nice in this case. I think he was locked down by the electrical patterns between my two staticky parents.
“Honey, go upstairs,” my mom said. “We’re having a conversation with your brother.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but I’m not sure precisely what it would have been. I mean, I didn’t have it planned out word for word. But I know the first word would have been “why.” Then I got smart—or at least self-protective—and closed my mouth again.
I started up the long, curvy, carpeted staircase—slowly, in case I could catch a few of their words. But they were onto me—they waited until they heard my footsteps shuffle all the way up to the second-floor landing. Then they started again, but in whispers.
I waited, one hand on the polished mahogany banister, but I couldn’t hear what they said. I could hear voices, but not words. Still, I stood there, looking down at the photos.
All the way down the staircase, hung on a spiral of wall and sloping with the pitch of the stairs, were framed photos of our family. My mom, Janet, and my dad, Brad. Yes, Brad and Janet, like in
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
. To this very day, it’s hard to say their names at the same time without breaking into song. And Joseph as a child—who’s really our half brother, not that it matters—and my full brother Aubrey, who’s younger. And me, of course. In the photos, we were such a happy family. You could see it. It was shiny and warm. It even seemed to have depth. It was just what pictures of a happy family should be.
I guess my dad got them to add the “happy” in the photo processing or the framing. He had a way of buying what he needed. Even revisions of reality can be purchased if you have the cash and you want it badly enough.
I climbed the rest of the way up the stairs and down the hall to Aubrey’s room to see if he was home yet, but his door was wide open, which it never in a million years would have been if he’d been around. Not even for a matter of seconds. I walked into his room, through the hanging stars and planets and solar systems. Walking through Aubrey’s room was like space travel through the galaxy. I looked out his window at the front yard, but nothing moved out there.
Then I realized what I’d forgotten.
I trotted back down the stairs and stuck my head into the static electricity that was this freshly horrible moment in our family.
My father yelled at me, right away, before I’d even had a chance to say a word in my own defense.
“I thought we told you we needed to talk to your brother privately!” he shouted.
He was a big man, too thick in the middle, with a great barrel chest and a deep voice. He seemed to pride himself on anything that was manly, like bulky size and baritone speaking.
“This is important,” I said.
“Fine. What?” my mom snapped.
“You forgot to pay the cab driver. He’s still out there with the meter running.”
My father leaped to his feet. For such a large man, he sure could be agile when there were savings involved. He was the kind of guy who would walk all over the house—which was quite a time-consuming patrol in that sprawling place—just to correct a stray lamp somebody might have left on. Just to save a few pennies. When he had so many.
“I’ll take care of this,” he said, and stomped out the door.
Our mom got to her feet. She looked down at Joseph. “I’m getting coffee. Don’t so much as move.” Then she disappeared into the kitchen.
I looked at Joseph and he looked at me. I guess I expected some kind of pleasant recognition, because we hadn’t seen each other in months. But I think he didn’t have the time or attention for that. He had a look in his eyes like I’d caught him on the way to his execution.
“Nice that you’re home,” I said.
“
Is
it now?” he said in return. Joseph had a wry way of looking at the world. Almost everything he said was sardonic at some level.
“Do you have to go back?”
“No.”
“How did you manage that?”
“It’s kind of a complicated story,” he said, flipping his head in the direction of the kitchen and my mom, indicating that she would never give him time to tell it.
Then my mom came back with a cup of coffee for herself, in that fine bone china we’re not allowed to use. I wondered if Joseph might have liked a cup. I was thinking the coffee must be much better here than on an army post in a war-torn Middle Eastern country. But she hadn’t bothered to offer any to anyone else, which didn’t seem all that surprising.
She stopped and shot me a look, and I ran up the stairs two at a time without anything more needing to be said.
When things got weird at the dinner table, my little brother, Aubrey, would focus on the chandelier. We had this enormous, fancy chandelier with all these dangling pieces of cut glass that caught the light like prisms. Or . . . well, I guess they
were
prisms.
I always wondered if it didn’t hurt his eyes to stare up into those lights. When I tried to do it, the bulbs burned these little white spots into my eyes that I kept seeing for minutes after I averted my gaze.